The Innards

'Brogan’s most striking method to date has involved the use of gloss paint, laid out to dry in large rectangles and then rolled up like tight pancakes, which are then hung, tied in knots or otherwise manipulated – a kind of painting in the third dimension. His work therefore relates to two opposed notions of artistic development in modernism, roughly speaking a classical and romantic sensibility. If the familiar narrative of modernism has been the disappearance of representation itself through an increasing abstraction and reduction to the limitations of the material form of the canvas, until the very distinction between painting and sculpture breaks down, an alternative lineage would include artists like Guston and Oldenburg who rejected the insularity of formalist development (for Greenberg the protection of high culture from mass produced kitsch) in order that their art could be as beautiful, scary and stupid as life itself.'